The Conscious Self (Ego)
Mediation, Differentiation, Assimilation, and Accommodation
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
"Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment. The child often sees only what he already knows" ...
-Jean Piaget
“A sign of the truth of a philosophy is to be able to account for the forms of thought other than itself”…
— Augusto del Noce
“All the actual character of consciousness is merely the sense of shock of the non-ego upon us”…
- Charles Sanders Peirce
Given the endemic embracement of Marxism across Western Civilisation since the emergence of Modernity and Post-Modernity, a key question emerges as to whether Western Civilisation has regressed back into an infantile child-like state of consciousness?
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The return to an Egocentrism**** that anchors Reality in oneself - a Primacy of Human Consciousness (e.g. Idealism - Descartes Cartesianism - Hegel Absolute Idealism - a Primacy of Man (e.g. Marxism)).
**** Note - Egocentrism can be distinguished from alternative in-relation-to ways of understanding Reality that has been central to the development of Western Civilisation intellectual thought. For example:
Thomistic Philosophy that explores the relationship between God, Conscious Man and the Natural World;
Peircian Semiotics that explores the relationship and meaning between the Observer (Interpretant) and Object (Subject Matter) mediated through Signs (Representamen); and
Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of Dasein that is central to his ontology. Dasein refers to the relation of this Being (Dasein) to Being (Sein). It reflects human existence that actively interprets and inquires into the nature of Being — it questions, it engages with, and it gives meaning to this relationship.
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Egocentrism is a state of Being described as part of 20th-century Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget’s observations on the early psychological development stages of an infantile child.
An egocentrism where the pursuit of truth fails to interest the child as it sees no harm in transposing facts with their desires.
[LINK] - Ego-focused trait of narcissism
An inability to differentiate between the Conscious Self - Ego and it’s Environment or what 20th-century existential Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre would recognise as an ontological distinction between pour soi (being for itself) and en soi (being in itself).
“It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires”…
— Jean Piaget
A failure to recognise the intentional nature of consciousness (always engaged with the world and objects therein) that Husserl had outlined. The inherent structure of consciousness that establishes a relationship between the subject & the world - the rejection of the notion of a self-enclosed mind.
An understanding of Human psychological development anchored in self-awareness and the development of human consciousness beyond the ego-state.
One that begins to recognise the complexity of the World we inhabit and the inherent relationship between the observer and observed.
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Egocentrism reflects a prevailing post-nietzschean modern will to power and orientation towards a power-directed system of thought (i.e. Marxism) where truth claims are administered, managed, and imposed by a secular progressive liberal orthodoxy.
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A growing ignorance of Heidegger’s Dasein - an understanding of Being that has at its very essence of Being, a relation of Being (Dasein) to this Being (Sein).
A failure to recognise the mediating nature of consciousness , a fabric of mediation that is not separate from Being but instead is Being’s way of coming to know itself.
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The meaning of Being understood by the Human Mind.
Consciousness as the mediation of Meaning from Entangled Being
“Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being”…
— Martin Heidegger
If Human Being is entangled with Being (Heidegger - phenomenological perspective - Being in the World) does the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics reflect the beginning of the process of bringing this entangled relationship of Being to the Human Mind?
In other words , the beginning of the process of separating discrete meaning by the conscious-self from entangled being (i.e. a definitive state vis a vis a quantum superposition - or - discrete meaning vis a vis an interwoven whole of existence) in the world?
Consciousness as the mediating layer for the observer that participates in the process of differentiating and articulating meaning from this primordial unity.
From a quantum perspective, the act of observation brings a potentiality into actuality, akin to how consciousness, through interpretation and conceptualisation, extracts distinct meanings from the raw, pre-categorised experience of Being.
The collapse of the wave function symbolises the way consciousness mediates and enables the observer through their lived contextual experience to actualise meaning from the continuum of an entangled Reality.
Consciousness as the fabric of Reality.
The mediation of one possibility of actualising meaning by the conscious-self from an interconnected whole - a relation of Being (Dasein) to this Being (Sein).
A dynamic process that enables the conscious-self to continuously differentiate (negate), assimilate (integrate) and accommodate (modify) new relationships of meaning into a mental schema.
An ongoing process of equilibration (balancing assimilation and accommodation) that reflects our active engagement in the world to bring a sense of coherence and unity of being.
Synthesising meaning from the undivided reality (i.e. everything that is in the act of Being) in which Human Being is entangled.
An intentional consciousness (Husserl) where Being is a relational state that unfolds through interpretation and understanding.
An active participation in Reality shaped by Human Being’s entanglement in the World.
Consciousness as the unfolding process of Meaning
"What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see" ...
- Jean Piaget
Consciousness functions as a continuous, evolving interplay—an oscillation between potentiality and actuality, unity and distinction.
This view suggests that rather than consciousness simply observing a world external to it, consciousness is the unfolding process of meaning itself, an ever-active weaving of distinction within the interwoven whole.
In other words, the fabric of mediation is not separate from Being; it is Being’s way of coming to know itself.
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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
“Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an act internalised as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a re-adaptation" ...
- Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget’s work on cognitive development aligns with these ideas in profound ways, particularly how the conscious-self and ego emerge through an ongoing process of differentiation (negation), assimilation (integration) and accommodation (modification) of mental schema that are refined through the process of equilibration (a self-regulating process of maintaining a balance between assimilation and accomodation) to reflect expanding complexity and our active engagement (embodied lived experiences) in the world.
Another way of describing, the mediation of meaning from the interwoven whole.
Piaget viewed cognitive development as a process of structuring experience through active interaction with the world (Heidegger - Being in the World).
In early childhood, the notion of the Self has yet to be differentiated from the environment (i.e. the notion of Being remains entangled) and experience is an undivided whole.
The infant initially does not distinguish between self and world but gradually constructs this distinction through action and adaptation (i.e. participation in Reality - Being in the World (Heidegger)).
Assimilation and accommodation reflect the core mechanisms for cognitive development. Assimilation involves incorporating new experiences into existing cognitive structures, whereas accommodation modifies those structures in response to new realities.
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A dynamic process that mirrors the role of consciousness in mediating meaning through integrating, differentiating, and refining our interpretation of experience over time.
At this early sensorimotor stage of cognitive development, there is also a gradual realisation that objects exist independently from our immediate perception and thereby the development of a growing capacity to distinguish between the Observer (Subject) and Observed (Object) (i.e. Peircian Semiotics) or stated differently, distinguish this Being (Dasein) from Being (Sein) (i.e. Heidegger).
The Ego and the Conscious Self emerges from this process of differentiation - a sense of the Self being distinct from the World in which the Self is entangled.
“To be a nominalist consists in the undeveloped state of one’s mind of the apprehension of Thirdness as Thirdness****. The remedy for it consists in allowing ideas of human life to play a greater part in one’s philosophy”…
– Charles Sanders Peirce
****Note - To apprehend Thirdness as Thirdness means to grasp the reality of the whole, the mediating structures that connect signs, minds, and the world. It is the capacity to recognise that meaning, being and knowing are inherently connected. [LINK] Habits, laws, actions and ideas are real and interdependent. Peirce viewed a nominalist as someone whose philosophical mind was insufficiently developed to recognise the actuality of generality of abstraction. Thirdness can be interpreted as the mediation of both an epistemological and ontological mode of Being ( i.e. one of three modes of Being - Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - Peirce’s Phenomenological Categories that form a Triadic alongside Aristotle’s Ontological Categories and Kant’s Epistemological Categories).
The Pre-Operational Stage (Age 2 to 7) continues to reflect this egocentrism and an ongoing struggle by the Child to see perspectives outside their own.
Yet, through the process of interaction and engagement with the World, new patterns of cognitive thought emerge, gradually enabling the Child to move beyond this egocentric view and leading to a more refined relational sense of self.
“A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family”…
― Desmond Tutu
It again aligns with the notion of consciousness being an unfolding mediation of meaning - a fabric of mediation coupled to Being.
Being’s way of coming to know itself.
Just as the collapse of the wave function selects a definite reality from superposition, the ego (subject) - non-ego (object) relationship arises as a way of structuring an otherwise undivided field of Being into distinct subject-object relations.
In summary, if the nature of Being is inherently entangled (Being in the World - Heidegger) then consciousness—through differentiation and adaptation—gradually mediates meaning from this whole, constructing the self in the process.
Piaget’s framework provides a psychological developmental perspective of how this occurs, showing that the self and ego are not pre-existing entities but emergent properties of interaction, interpretation, abstraction and embodied meaning.
Kellog’s Metaphysics of Modal Realism
“We can imagine the impossible, provided we do not imagine it in perfect detail and all at once”…
― David Kellogg Lewis
20th Century American Philosopher David Kellogg Lewis metaphysical ideas relating to modal realism and counterfactuals, offers an explanatory framework that supports the idea of consciousness as the ongoing mediation of meaning from an entangled whole.
His contribution to metaphysics - modal realism - implicitly synthesises ideas from modal logic, Aristotle’s metaphysics (e.g. being, existence etc…) and even Peircian semiotics.
Rather than attempting to understand Reality through the prism of Rosmini’s Real Being (e.g. Heidegger’s Being in the World) can Rosmini’s Ideal Being**** also illuminate (via Modal Logic) the nature of Reality?
[ ****Note: - If Being is the act of Existing and Reality is everything that Exists (both Actual Being & Potential Being (Aristotle)), then Reality is inclusive of everything that is in the act of Being or potential Being ( Aristotle & Saint Thomas Aquinas)]
Modal logic is a form of logical thought that deals with necessity, possibility, and impossibility.
Its origins can be traced back to the The Square of Opposition that was developed from Aristotle’s metaphysics for categorical propositions**** (i.e. All S are P (necessity), No S are P (impossibility), Some S are P (possibility), and Some S are not P (possibility)).
[ ****Note: Aristotle’s propositional claims and modal statements are statements (i.e. truth claims) about Reality (i.e. form of substance) that combine abstract concepts with objects in the World. They literally connect meaning of an abstract concept of the Observer with an object that has been Observed. The connection of the concept and object is mediated via signs (e.g. language - refer to Charles Sanders Peirce). The combination of Epistemology (what can we know) and Ontology (what can exist) reflects two parts of this triadic relationship of meaning (a Metaxic Semiotic) that, when combined, form the basis of modal logic (i.e. Necessity, Possibility, Impossibility) of the Modal Realism Metaphysics of 20th Century Philosopher David Kellog Lewis ]
In contrast to Peirce’s semiotics or Heidegger’s phenomenology, David Kellog Lewis used modal logic (anchored in a form of human thought (logic) ) as the instrument for his inquiry into understanding the nature of Reality (i.e. Metaphysics is the study of Being - science of Reality).
Lewis’s theory of modal realism, holds that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world.
He viewed these possible worlds as not simply abstract concepts or linguistic constructs ( i.e. a distinction to other modal theories) but instead believed they exist within their own independent Reality with their own identity.
In other words, possible worlds have the same ontological status as our actual world.
Each possible world is a self-contained totality, wholly disconnected from others, yet just as real.
Our actual world is not metaphysically privileged but simply reflects an indexical relationship between the subject and object. Any given world is actual only from the perspective of its own being’s relationship.
Modal realism aims to provide an explanatory metaphysical framework for understanding the truth conditions of modal statements—claims about what is possible, necessary, or impossible.
It is a theory that leverages the power of abstraction and logic to explore the modal structure of how we understand reality—not just - what it is? - but - what could it be?
A metaphysical logical system that grounds human modal intuitions in realism, enabling ontological claims about the high-dimensional space of all possible states of Being in the world.
Lewis’s Modal Logic - Necessity, Possibility, Impossibility and Counterfactuals - Consciousness mediation and interpretation of Meaning from Ideal Being
Lewis’s work on counterfactuals—if-then statements about alternate possibilities—suggests that actual meaning is shaped by our engagement with potential alternatives.
Consciousness, in this sense, could be viewed as a structure that mediates between different possible interpretations of reality (i.e. everything that is in the act of Being (e.g. Rosmini - Real Being) or potential of Being (e.g. Rosmini - Ideal Being), much like how Lewis’s counterfactuals assess how different scenarios would play out under various conditions.
This also ties into Piaget’s idea that intelligence matures and further develops through hypothetical reasoning.
“So we must start from this dual nature of intelligence as something both biological and logical”…
— Jean Piaget
As children grow, they move from concrete operational thinking to formal operational thinking, where they can consider abstract possibilities and hypothetical worlds—essentially, engaging with counterfactuals.
If we apply this to the conscious self, we could say that the ego is not just a static entity but a structure that forms through the navigation of counterfactual possibilities, helping us make meaning by comparing "what is" with "what could be"
“What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal”…
— Werner Heisenberg
If all possible worlds exist (as Lewis claims), then the process of consciousness might not be about creating meaning from a void but rather filtering or selecting (interpreting) meaning from an already rich, entangled field of Possible Being.
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This would mean that rather than a rigid collapse of the wave function, consciousness could be seen as an ongoing entanglement with multiple possible meanings at once—similar to how we can entertain multiple interpretations before settling on one.
Piaget’s concept of equilibration, where the self maintains balance between different cognitive structures, parallels this idea of navigating between possibilities in a way that maintains coherence and meaning.
Interpreting Lewis in a broader context of Peirce’s Semiotics and Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Being
The interpretation and understanding of David Kellog Lewis’s Modal Realism when combined with Peirce’s Semiotics and Heidegger’s Dasein (Being in the World) can be reframed and broadened in its relevance.
Modal Realism offers a pathway to a new understanding of Reality in which the Actual World emerges through Human Being’s participation in Being, shaping meaning through the relationship between the Observer and the Observed and where ontology (what can we know) & epistemology (what can exist) are mediated via signs.
Idea of Being (Rosmini) illuminates the capacity to Reason — Intelligibility of Reality
At the same time, Possible Worlds exist as an ontological horizon—an independent objective field of possibilities (i.e. a type of realism) - a super-position - that has yet to be actualised into definite meaning.
A World of Possibility that can be explored through Abstraction, Modal Logic and Counterfactuals.
In other words:
The Actual World reflects the way in which Human Being, through their engagement with Being, interpret and disclose an actual lived experience Reality, allowing meaning to emerge through the interplay between subject and object; whereas
Possible Worlds constitute a broader possible Reality that exists independently of Human Being in the World— Unactualised realms where Being unfolds as a plurality of possibilities, not contingent on human participation.
It is an understanding of Reality that reflects the necessity of Human Being (Dasein) relationship with Being (Sein) (i.e. Heidegger) to reveal an Actual World, and by doing so, it also reveals the Possible Worlds that exist beyond this actualisation that depends on how Human’s participate in Reality.
In other words:
Actual World reflects Human Being’s participation in Reality (i.e. through this Being’s relationship to Being, the meaning of concepts emerges by the Observer (Subject) from what is being Observed (Object)); whereas
Possible Worlds reflects a broader horizon of possible Reality independent of Human Being. An ontological horizon where Being is a field of possibilities (Possible Worlds) that have yet to be defined and shaped by Human Being Meaning.
Human Being’s relationship to Real Being (e.g. Heidegger - Being in the World), Ideal Being (e.g. David Kellog Lewis - Modal Realism) and Moral Being (Kant - Morality)
It brings together the Human Mind of the Observer (Subject) and the Observed (Objects) being Observed into a metaphysical relational understanding of Reality.
It makes a distinction between an independent Objective Reality of Possible Worlds, but it also recognises the subjective role of Human Being’s participation in Reality to reveal meaning through their lived experience that is manifested into an Actual World.
It highlights how our best theories are not necessarily simple but explanatory by taking the infinity of possible existence and actualising them through human’s participation in Reality (i.e. a relation of this Being to Being (Heidegger)).
In other words, meaning is the actualisation of the potentiality of being.
The materialisation of what is possible.
The transformation of potential being into the act of being.
Conclusion
Can our Crisis of Modernity and Post-Modernity be attributed to an orientation towards the Primacy of Human Consciousness - the Primacy of Man?
A Theology of Marxism and regression to an Egocentrism.
Can the insights of Jean Piaget (Childhood Psychological Development), David Kellog Lewis (Metaphysics), Martin Heidegger ( Phenomenology - Being in the World), and Charles Sanders Peirce (Semiotic Triadic) be instructive for Western Civilisation overcoming this present state (i.e. endemic Marxism)?
For example:
Jean Piaget provides a developmental framework for how a relational understanding of human consciousness of subject-object - beyond an egocentrism, progressively develops over time in childhood.
David Kellogg Lewis’s modal realism provides a new metaphysical perspective (based on modal logic) of the nature of Reality, where all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. Rather than focusing on the self (i.e. egocentrism) as a meaning-making entity, Lewis’s framework treats possible worlds as objective and independent realities, existing regardless of human perception or participation. Through this, he broadens our understanding of necessity—truths that independently hold across all possible worlds—beyond the confines of our subjective, embodied lived experience in the actual world.
Martin Heidegger’s concept - this Being (Dasein) to Being (Sein) - highlights the embodied nature of Being in the World and the relational nature of Man’s attempts to understand Reality (Metaphysics - study of Being - Science of Reality).
Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic nature of Semiotics and how, through the relationship between the subject-object (mediated via Signs) new relationships of meaning (via abduction) emerge from our embodiment in the World. A Category of Human Thought — modes of Being — that bridges Aristotle’s Ontology and Kant’s Epistemology (via the Pragmatic Maxim).
“But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs”…
– Charles Sanders Peirce
All these ideas highlight the role consciousness plays in the mediation of Man’s participation in Reality.
Rather than simply Being, consciousness is an active process of interpretation - distinguishing (differentiation), selecting (assimilation), and integrating (accommodation) meaning from an interconnected whole (Rosmini - Real Being, Ideal Being & Moral Being).
A relationship of this Being (Dasein) to Being (Sein).
